“By providing information on lessons learned and insights gained on adaptation to climate change from global, country, and sector-level analyses, the hope is to help policymakers worldwide prioritize actions, along with developing a robust, integrated approach for greater resilience to climate risks.”

– Economics of Climate Change Project, The World Bank

DOWNSCALED DATA

Downscaling -or increasing in resolution of Global Circulation Models (GCMs) through statistical modeling-, and a bias-correcting methodology at both a finer spatial and temporal resolution is needed to better represent the influence of topography and regional climate patterns on both the average and variation in climate, and to more accurately and completely assess future climate impacts.

A collaborative effort between The World Bank, The Nature Conservancy, Climate Central, and Santa Clara University has now produced the first standardized set of daily DOWNSCALLED GCM projections that span the entire globe. You can find more detailed information here (PDF 2.03MB).

On the portal, these data is available at the country and major water basin level with an interface that will allow the user to map, chart, query, and compare downscaled data across historical and future time periods with the click of a button.

More about these data

Available downscaled data includes all terrestrial daily data archived in CMIP3 the standard for raw GCM data distribution from the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report- and includes: 9 different Global Climate Models (GCMs), some with multiple model runs, across 3 different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios (SRES A2, A1b, B1), totaling 53 future projections, all downscaled to a 0.5 degree resolution (~50 km) for the time periods of 1961-1999, 2046-2045, and 2071-2100. The daily downscaled outputs total 3.5 Terabytes.

The primary variables in the dataset include gridded and tabular data for precipitation, maximum temperature and minimum temperature, which are available for download at a global scale. More than 23 climate statistics are available and include gridded datasets and monthly averages for country, continents, and major river basins in Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East, and North Africa regions.

The availability of these data now to the scientific and practitioner communities around the world, represent a huge step in bridging the gap between climate science and on-the-ground decision making.